This invention relates to an electronic system and method for processing a signal obtained from the electro-optical analyzation of a precisely prepared serum chemistry.
The chemical analyzation of a serum, e.g., for the presence of sugar or albumin content, or any of many other assays vital to medical diagnosis, is generally performed by adding specific amounts of various reactive chemicals or reagents to a sample of serum in a specific sequence and under specified conditions of temperature and time thereby causing a change in color or light absorbance to occur which is related to the amount of the substance being measured in serum. Various manual and automated procedures have been used.
Manual procedures are usually performed in a laboratory by a trained technician. The technician prepares a test sample, commonly referred to as a test chemistry, comprised of a portion of a serum specimen to be tested and the proper amounts of the chemical reagents specified for that particular test. The resulting test chemistry, after formulation, must be analyzed with specific care taken to note the extent to which a desired reaction has taken place.
The reaction evaluation is done using a spectrophotometer. The output of the spectrophotometer represents the amount of a certain band width of light which the chemistry under test passes with respect to the amount of the same band width of light passed by a sample containing all other constituents in the test except the serum. The level of this comparative transmittance must be then transformed into units which represent the element concentrations or optical density of the test chemistry to present meaningful data to the technician so that he might evaluate the test.
Disadvantages of manual procedures include not only an undue amount of time and labor, but this type of laboratory testing is at most, even under the most optimum conditions only proportioned to the skill of the technician.
Several systems have also been proposed and used which present the optical density of test chemistries by means of a strip recorder. This technique results in a cumbersome amount of data paper, along with the inherent reading problems which are highly susceptible to error.